Gabor Gombas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 04:46:30PM -0400, Kris Deugau wrote:
>> However, there doesn't seem to be any single, consistent, >> doesn't-change-for-the-life-of-the-release, programmatically possible >> (never mind *easy* just yet...) method to find out if I'm on Debian >> sarge, etch, lenny, or some third-party Debian-derived distribution. > Your approach is wrong. Many machines have packages installed from > multiple distributions simultaneously (sarge+etch, sarge+backports, > etch+backports, etch+lenny, lenny+sid, sid+experimental are probably the > most common combinations nowadays). Backported packages may even be > compiled locally so they may not have any distribution associated with > them at all. Hm, it's often not a good idea to tell people that they're doing something wrong just because it doesn't work globally with everyone's systems. It can come across poorly, and often what they're asking for makes perfect sense in their environment. If we as a project can't provide them with the right tool because it doesn't make sense in our context, that's a good response, but just telling them they're taking the wrong approach isn't particularly useful. For example, at Stanford, while some of our staff workstations do have those package mixes, our servers are either sarge or etch. Asking whether a given server is sarge or etch is a quite reasonable and rational question with a well-defined response. And it is very useful for us to be able to select, inside Puppet, whether a given system is sarge or etch (to take an obvious example, we want to maintain sources.list via Puppet, but we don't want Puppet to convert a sarge system to an etch system or vice versa). Doing that via automatic discovery on the system is the right approach since maintaining a list of what systems are which (ever-changing given that we're doing upgrades now) would be tedious and often inaccurate for our hundreds of servers. lsb-release via facter works quite well for this purpose for us. That it doesn't work with sid/lenny systems isn't a problem for us currently, and will never be a problem provided that it's fixed before lenny becomes stable. :) -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
